Graduating From 'Sad Sack With A Guitar' To 'Comfortable, 30-Year-Old Guy'

While he maintains a touring band that features a rotating cast of musicians, Gow remains the sole songwriting force behind Oh Mercy, penning the lyrics and musical arrangements himself before taking them to the studio for recording with other professional musicians.

As a result, the writing process for his new album, Cafe Oblivion, was one that saw him engage with personal observations from his daily life in the leafy suburbs of Melbourne. "Lots of these songs aren't your traditional, first-person songs," he explains. "I would walk down to the Abbotsford Convent most days for a coffee, so lots of the observations were made of the area and certainly they worked their way into the music."

However, the links between the convent, which these days functions as a converted artists' space, and Gow's songwriting can be extrapolated further. "That's fair enough," he agrees. "I wouldn't say it's got so much to do with the convent, but probably my interest in the convent does stem from my interest in established religions. In particular, Catholicism. The same thing that makes me interested in that is the same part of my brain that gets excited reading Greek and Greco-Roman mythology, and Celtic mythology. It's just that lots of the stories are fantastic and full of really interesting and bizarre imagery."

The influence can be heard in a number of Gow's songs, but Lee & Nancy is a particularly relevant example, full of allusions to biblical characters and images. "All that kind of stuff - that works for me because it's incredibly irreverent to talk about how just like the nails that pierced through the skin of Christ onto the crucifix were close to him, I want to be close to you like that. That makes me smile, because it's incredibly irreverent and bizarrely romantic. A lot of these lines are just personal little kicks, things that make me laugh and, therefore, I hope, that make someone else smile."

This simultaneously grotesque and sentimental tone is one that Gow employs throughout Cafe Oblivion, his fifth album under the moniker, as he experiments with surrealism to a degree that his previous work hasn't explored, describing the Cafe Oblivion attitude as "this absurdist, kind of irreverent and playful philosophy of writing". However, he pauses after saying this then qualifies his statement. "Actually, I don't want to call it a philosophy; that gives it way too much weight."

The inspiration for this aesthetic approach came from a series of Parisian paintings he thinks were "maybe fashionable in the 1920s and 1930s", depicting characters lounging around in bars and cafes. "I felt like there was something incredibly psychedelic about those paintings and that imagery, and I transplanted that onto an Australian bar; it's kind of this fabricated, absurd bar at the end of the world where all these people - you know, past, present and future - are together. And that bar is called Cafe Oblivion in my imagination."

However, this approach marks a significant shift from Gow's previous record, When We Talk About Love, which he describes as being written at a time when he was feeling profoundly unhappy. "I was just a sad sack with a guitar, so that's the way that album sounded," he explains. "And when I wasn't a sad sack with a guitar anymore, I was a comfortable, 30-year-old guy living in Abbotsford keeping himself busy with lots of other creative pursuits, happy to be more playful. It all just has to do with my frame of mind and I was, and am, in an exciting and really comfortable frame of mind."

This perspective is captured on the album's artwork, which features Gow reclining in his Abbotsford apartment where he recorded the demos for the record. "This time around I wanted to have myself on the album cover for the first time. I figured after five [albums] you've earned the right to put your own ugly head on the front cover. Also, the other reason I did that was because it was the first time that I felt like I really nailed my personality in an album; I feel like the album represents the best version of me. At least, I'd like to think so."